I love art museums when I’m alone, but they drive me crazy with other people. I don’t have the patience to look at one piece of art for a long time, and I want to see EVERYTHING. So I do get tired quickly.

But other comments made me remember: There’s a sculpture in Port Authority Bus Terminal in NYC of a bunch of people waiting at a bus gate; it’s in the middle of the Information rotunda, so there’s no mistaking the gate for a real one. One day when I was waiting for someone there, just to be Dada I stood in line behind the last sculpture. I couldn’t freeze totally because I didn’t have a lookout, but I moved as little as possible.

Got some very startled reactions, even though the sculptures are all plaster-off-white and I was dressed in ordinary clothes. My plan to come back all powdered and with a lookout never came off.

I did that at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (NYC), just last week. We were there for almost 5 hours and we spent over 45 minutes discussing how one helmet was made. My feet were killing me when we left. It is due to those hard floors; they need that rubber matting.

Once upon a time, I visited DC with my then-boyfriend. We were only going to be there for two days (he was there for his job), so we took in the Mall, including all its memorials, and walked by the Capital and White House. The Vietnam Wall had a huge impact on me: not just the Wall itself, but the ancillary collection of mementos people had left there. That was Day 1.

The next day we went to the Smithsonian. Not knowing any better, we tried to do the whole Smithsonian in one day. Don’t ever, ever try that. Someone somewhere should have taken a picture of Boyfriend and me, collapsed on a bench outside the Smithsonian, in complete mental overload and physical exhaustion.

I did not believe it was necessary to do so, so, no. Other people in the same situation might feel otherwise. I don’t think the picture paints the couple in an unflattering light in any event. I took the picture because after a few hours in the museum, I knew how they felt.

Have you ever been to the Boston Museum of Fine Art? Best in the country, even better than the Met. A joy to walk around in: it’s a large square with a courtyard in the middle and at each corner there is a larg-ish café where you can recuperate and the absolute world’s best-ever gift shop. A real gallery, not the anonymous “major tourism experience” so many other places are degenerating into.

Legally, you can take a picture of anyone without their permission if the property owner allows it. Public property allows it.

The exception to this rule is if the photo violates the expectation of privacy, which would be stuff like upskirt photos, or use of a telephoto lens to view something otherwise unviewable (zooming into someone’s bedroom window from a point on public property a mile away, for example).

Folks who think you need permission to photograph someone on public property, by all means, next time you’re in front of the roman colosseum, try running around and getting permission from the hundreds of people who will end up in your tourist photo.